TEN YEARS GONE: Even Beasts (Revised)

The Reach of God’s Care in a Living World

First Published January 12, 2016. Revised April 24, 2026. 

…you save both man and beast, O Lord.

— Psalm 36

This reflection was first written in early 2016, when I was tracing a thread that had been emerging for me — the depth and character of God’s love. It had led me, at the time, to the language of union, even to the idea that God desires something as complete and unbreakable as a marriage with His people.

But then comes a line like this from the Psalms, and it quietly widens the picture.

“You save both man and beast, O Lord.”

It is such a simple statement that it is easy to pass over. But if you stop and sit with it for a moment, it opens up something unexpectedly gentle. God’s care is not narrowly focused. It is not limited to human concerns alone. It extends outward, into all that He has made.

In 2016, I found myself wondering — perhaps a bit playfully, but also sincerely — about what that might mean. People often ask whether animals are somehow included in God’s ultimate purposes. Will we see them again? Do they matter in the same way we do?

Scripture does not answer those questions in a systematic way. But it does offer glimpses like this one, and those glimpses suggest that God’s concern for life is broader than we tend to assume.

Animals live without the layers of moral complexity that define human life. They act according to their nature. When they harm, it is not out of malice, but out of instinct. “They know not what they do,” in a very real sense. And yet they are sustained, provided for, and — in some way we do not fully understand — included in the care of God.

In this season after Easter, that thought lands differently.

We are living in the light of resurrection, where the story moves unmistakably toward restoration. Not just survival, not just endurance, but renewal. The promise is not that God abandons what He has made, but that He brings it forward into something whole.

That does not mean we can map out exactly what eternity will look like. But it does mean we can trust the character of the One who holds it.

He delights in life.
He sustains what He creates.
And nothing that matters to Him is casually discarded.

So perhaps the better question is not whether animals are “saved” in the way we tend to define it, but whether they are known and held within the goodness of God.

And Psalm 36, in its quiet way, suggests that they are.